What do we expect from Hines' Martians

[themotile]

Awoooga! Awoooga!

[quaderni]

I guess it'd give the 'Ulla, ulla, ulla' a whole new meaning.

I went from Donna Harraway to porn. Damn.

[Lensman]

quaderni said:

There's a long tradition in Western literature in which writers use 'narrator(s)' - through memoirs, letters, journals, etc. - to create verisimilitude. This had started in the 18th century with the rise of the epistolary novel (think Richardson's _Clarissa_). By the late Victorian period, however, many authors used this convention not to achieve verisimilutude, but actually to probe the limits of reality and representation.

That's a fascinating "take"on Victorian writing, Quaderni. Your post was one of the most interesting and thoughtful I've ever seen in this forum. Thanks for sharing!

I can't say I agree with your conclusion, however. Wells says quite clearly that the different machines are "worn" by the Martians for different tasks. You might consider the combination of the Martian controller and either the handling-machine or the Tripod to be a step towards a cyborg, but it's actually more like a human using a waldo or powered exoskeleton.

[McTodd]

Ah, a waldo, that's what I was trying to think of, ta Lensman!

That, I believe, is the crucial difference - the Martians' machines amplify existing capabilities of theirs (think of Ripley in the Power Loader in Aliens). So they can move quickly in their Fighting Machines, build things in their Handling Machines, etc. If you take a Martian out of its machine, it is still a Martian, intact and recognisable.

Whereas if you remove the mechanical parts from a cyborg, you're just left with a bleeding mess...

Leon Stover, in his annotated WotW, also presents the Unreliable Narrator argument (to excess, I feel - he positively despises the Narrator, and makes various assumptions about what the Narrator has written that I think are untenable, or at least can be interpreted more charitably).

[Refugee]

I also saw the martians a bit like Krang, anyone remember that? From the mutant turtles thing, he was just a brain and so had robotic contraptions to act as bodies when needed. One thing I noticed about the cyborg deffinitions posted earlier, this is very picky of me, they all involve the term human and the martians are not. Anyway Im not saying I think anyone is right or wrong I just know what I would like to see, big metallic and mennacing, a sort of "If the Victorians had invented the micro-chip."

[Lensman]

Refugee said:

One thing I noticed about the cyborg deffinitions posted earlier, this is very picky of me, they all involve the term human and the martians are not.

The term "cybernetic organism" does not imply any restriction to the human species. Godwhale by T.J. Bass (1973) is about a whale cyborg, and the cylon fighter ships in the new "Battlestar Galactica" are cyborgs.

[McTodd]

Aye, and which is why I wrote earlier:

...in conventional usage in science fiction, cyborgs are always creatures (human or otherwise) with parts of their bodies replaced by machinery...

[themotile]

Cool, my Nans a cyborg! She has a new hip! Nice.

[McTodd]

We can rebuild her...

Altogether now:

Da da da daaaaaaa,
Da da daa da da,
Da da da daaaaaa...

Hit slo-mo!

[quaderni]

Lensman said:

I can't say I agree with your conclusion, however. Wells says quite clearly that the different machines are "worn" by the Martians for different tasks. You might consider the combination of the Martian controller and either the handling-machine or the Tripod to be a step towards a cyborg, but it's actually more like a human using a waldo or powered exoskeleton.

Thanks for the nice words, Lensman! Alas, the cyborg idea really isn't mine and it isn't new - it started with McConnell's classic study and shows up again in the recent Indiana UP critical edn of _The War_ (far superior to Stover's edn, in my humble opinion). I'm not arguing that they are cyborgs in the way we now understand the term. However, I would say that the organism-machine symbiosis is something that we're supposed to consider seriously and see in a very ambivalent light.

Actually, if we look at the first definition of the cyborg (as coined in 1960) - I'd point again to my above posting - it eerily evokes the Martian FM or HM ideas, in which you have machinical bodies worn by explorers in an extraterrestrial (and hostile) environment. That said, I'd also genetly press the point that Martian technology/machinery is central to their course of biological evolution, so it should weigh heavily on our reading of the organic-machine symbiosis the fictional Martians have achieved. As Wells stresses - and I think this is significant - the Martians took the organism as the source of their machinery. So I'd say that the life-machine dichotomy is meant to be seen in a very ambiguous light.

BTW, McTodd, I'm not saying Wells is some kind of 'omnipotent' visionary. However, he is a very serious writer and he is taken as such within literary circles today. It's quite appropriate, I'd argue, that he'd pack layers of meanings into his texts and that these layers are ripe for in-depth analysis interpretation. Actually, this is why we can still read him today in such meaningful ways (most other science fiction has a short shelf life, so to speak). Great literature is great because people keep on returning to it; we simply cannot exhaust the limits of interpretation.

The 'unreliable narrator' is an important trope, though. It's a staple in modern literature, and shows up in all sorts of works, ranging from Laclos's _Les liaisons dangereuses_ to Bram Stoker's _Dracula_, Mary Shelley's _FRankenstein_, and even Wells's _The Time Machine_ (you can note that both Shelley's Frankenstein and the Time Machine have a double narrator frame -- a narrator is narrating an original narration whose veracity is in question). I'd suggest, politely, that authorial intent has to be weighed seriously, particularly when we're dealing with a serious writer. But that's just my point of view.

[Lensman]

quaderni said:

Actually, if we look at the first definition of the cyborg (as coined in 1960) - I'd point again to my above posting - it eerily evokes the Martian FM or HM ideas, in which you have machinical bodies worn by explorers in an extraterrestrial (and hostile) environment. That said, I'd also genetly press the point that Martian technology/machinery is central to their course of biological evolution, so it should weigh heavily on our reading of the organic-machine symbiosis the fictional Martians have achieved. As Wells stresses - and I think this is significant - the Martians took the organism as the source of their machinery. So I'd say that the life-machine dichotomy is meant to be seen in a very ambiguous light.

Certainly the Martians are utterly dependant upon their machinery, since they don't even eat and require blood artificially injected into their bloodstream for nutrition. And that does parallel the sort of dependancy that cyborgs have on their non-living parts.

Perhaps you see this as philosophically equivalent to being a cyborg. My own view of a cyborg is one of an organism in "symbiosis" with artificial parts. Of course the symbiosis is as artificial as the cybernetic parts, but that doesn't stop the symbiosis from being a real one. The Martians are dependent on their machines, but this is not an interdependency, so I see it as fundamentally different. Perhaps you see that as hair-splitting.

You raise an intriguing point, tho: What did Wells mean to suggest by having their machines be so animal-like? The first time I read WotW, the thing about the Martians not using the wheel struck me as just an attempt to portray them as alien. More recently, I've come to think it is because their machines are patterned after living beings, and no living organism uses the wheel.

There's no question that Wells meant his readers to think of the Martians as mere brains, and their machines their bodies. He describes their use of the handling machines in just that way. But did Wells intend this as symbolism for a deeper meaning?

And why are we having this discussion here-- doesn't it belong in the "Original Novel" forum?

[McTodd]

Quaderni, I do not doubt Wells' seriousness as a writer and thinker, and I do not read him lightly. WotW is not just an alien invasion story, it has many levels, none of them as unambiguous as one might suppose. That is why we are able to discuss it at such length - after all, if, say, there was no ambiguity about the cyborg question, this thread would have lasted precisely this long:

Quaderni:
I think the Martians are cyborgs - what do you lot think?

Lensman/McTodd/et al:
Yes, we agree.

The End.

It is abundantly clear, as you remark, that Wells is making serious speculations about the development of technology, and by presenting the Martians and their devices in such a close relationship, he is at least asking us to think about where we might be heading - away from the book I have to paraphrase from memory, but he writes something along the lines of: 'We men with our roadskates and Lilienthal gliding machines are only at the start of the long evolution that the Martians have worked out' (or something like that).

In fact , the questions he asks (or, rather, implies) are as relevant today as ever they were.

[Refugee]

I see what you were getting at now with the cyborg thing, sorry brain gone on holiday for a moment.

[HTT]

Maybe they're not cyborgs but cyberpunks?

As I understand it, a cyborg is a complete meshing of organic and robotics, in a symbiotic relationship - one cannot be removed without the death of the other. Whereas a cyberpunk is an organism that can meld or attach, weaponry (or other equiment) to itself, each part of which is interchangeable without affecting the host. For example, The Terminator is a Cyborg (man/machine), but the Mean Machine is a Cyberpunk (able to remove parts of his grated arm and apply different weapons onto it).

A cyberpunk'd martian would enter any machine, and 'link in' using implants and wotnot to manipulate it, disconnecting from the machine for a bit of a rest, then pop over to a new machine, hook up and use it for summat else?

Does this help, or am I talking thru my buttocks?

Oh, back to what I expect from Hines' martians - probably something similar to that concept shot they issued ages ago. Beaky gob on a leather mass, two huge black eyes and a mass of thinner tentacles - of which I expect it to 'walk' on either 5 or 3, and use the rest as arms.

[Leatherhead]

Personally, i would LOVE stop Motion martians, There is something keenly unearthly about the way clay can be animated. If anyone has seen a Tim Burton film they will know what i'm talking about. It would add to the creepy factor.